The Catalyst

Most Recent Posts

A child born today can expect to live 30 years longer than a child born a century ago; that difference represents practically my entire life. Children may not realize the incredible progress that has been made, but their parents will. We all laugh at the, 'when I was your age, I had to walk 3 miles up hill in the snow with no shoes' comparisons, but things have changed.

Matt Herper's Forbes post yesterday highlights an issue we've been in an uproar over for years now: the quickly growing problem of the antibiotics pipeline. Bacteria are evolving faster than companies can bring new antibiotics to market, which leads to problems like upticks in MRSA infections and other superbugs.

I'm a little bit obsessed with layman's astronomy - I downloaded NASA's phone app within hours of getting my new Smartphone and excitedly check the news for Higgs-Boson updates. The geek in me gets a toe-tingle when unrelated fields of research interact with one another and they renovate each other's thinking; this TEDx talk about interactions between astronomers and neurologists is a fascinating example.

For a while now I've intended to use my little Nike tracking device that can be attached to my running shoe and connected to my Nano. Big-brother-is-watching-me paranoia aside, it would be a great monitoring tool as I "train" for the Cherry Blossom 10-miler (though less effective on a treadmill).

There's a buzz going on today, caused by an article in The New York Times about government oversight of biopharmaceutical research company payments to physicians. These payments, as our web site's sales and marketing page explains, are compensation for important educational and research services provided by expert physicians.

This morning, I was speaking with fellow blog contributor Jeff Trewhitt - who himself credits a medicine with saving his life when he was diagnosed with a very rare cancer - about how the biopharmaceutical sector is seen as not being innovative anymore.

As Jeff pointed out, that view is wrong - in reality, companies are more innovative than ever before.

Children are not "small adults" when it comes to medicine, a fact pointed out in a recent article in NIH's Winter edition of Medline Magazine. Parents want nothing but the best for their children and previously that was hard to determine when it came to medicines. Historically, many FDA-approved drugs had not been studied in pediatric populations, resulting in inadequate or unavailable information on dosing, safety, efficacy and side effects.

According to an Associated Press article in the Washington Post that caught my eye today, India has reached a remarkable - and admittedly surprising - milestone: one full year without any new diagnoses of polio.

Today I'm pleased to introduce to Catalyst readers PhRMA's new vice president of scientific affairs, Dr. Salvatore Alesci. Dr. Alesci has worked in research at the government level, for the National Institutes of Health, as well as for several biopharmaceutical research companies. Today, I sat down with Dr. Alesci to ask him a few questions about his experiences and his thoughts about the future of R&D.

How did you get into the field of biopharmaceutical research and development?

A steady stream of state legislatures is coming back into session throughout the month, and considering that most states have budget shortfalls, Medicaid is likely to emerge as a popular target for cuts.

Yesterday, the government released its annual report on how much we're spending as a country on health care goods and services. Formally known as the National Health Expenditure Accounts, the government research shows a continued rate of historically low spending growth for retail prescription medicines.

It is worth checking out an interesting blog piece that ran in The Washington Post over the weekend about the government funding military innovation. Oftentimes, people mistakenly believe that the government also funds the majority of biopharmaceutical innovation, but this couldn't be further from the truth.

An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) presents some exciting news on the fight against HIV/AIDS. New research, to be published Wednesday in the journal Nature, shows that some investigational new vaccines may protect monkeys against a powerful strain of the virus.